


Silver Tree

by lynndyre



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Beginnings, Family, Fourth Age, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 22:19:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3305438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Third Age ended in departure.  The Fourth Age belonged to those who chose to remain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silver Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ysilme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ysilme/gifts).



In the scant years following Sauron's defeat, as the Third Age drew to a close, East Lorien took shape. Steadily, both in land and in dwelling, the elves encouraged the southern Greenwood to grow again, and built new flets, balconies, and homes among the battle-scarred branches. The damage done by war was healing.

The damage wrought by other things was harder to heal, and had no remedy east of the Sea.

As they departed Caras Galadhon for the last time, Celeborn stood long beside the High Seat, and felt the space beside him as a living emptiness, though his wife stood then still on the soft grass far below. He reached out his hand, and traced the arm rest where her fingers had worn the wood smooth, moreso than the finest grain of sanding could ever match.

He kept his hand on the living tree as he descended, and felt its grey-gold song, so long constant. Without Nenya, that song would slow, and eventually fall to silence. One by one, as he went, he spoke to the trees, and thanked the great mallorn for bearing up their homes and lives, through the long years. 

The swan boats, patched and sanded from the marks of arrows, carried everyone across the Anduin the final time. The echo of the trees followed him until the rush of the river drowned it out.

 

Scarce two years before they set forth again, on the slow, winding sorrow of the road to the Sea. The journey to the Havens was a time for closeness before parting. And yet as they rode, he already felt her thought turning away from Middle Earth towards the distant West. 

It was not lack of caring, he told his daughter's sons, that kept their father's eyes fixed away from their own. Elrond was burdened even as Galadriel, and Celeborn could feel Galadriel's longing for Celebrian, for her brother, for other family long missed. He could feel the aching fatigue in her soul, craving relief he could not give.

Indeed, that he could not understand.

Elladan's teeth were gritted, keeping back thoughts that swarmed instead in his dark eyes. Elrohir's silent tears wet Celeborn's shoulder, and his voice was muffled that only Celeborn might hear. "What makes it pull everyone away?"

And Celeborn could only hold him, and his brother, and confess he did not know. 

Aman was called Elvenhome, in the tradition of the Noldor who had lived in its beauty. But the first elvenhome had been the shores of a lake, under the stars, and the twilight woods beside Cuivienen. Celeborn was not old enough to remember that lake. But he remembered the twilight. The sun had risen, and his lady had followed its coming.

As he watched the white ships vanish into the horizon, a part of him expected starlight to return.

 

He returned to East Lorien, leaving Elladan and Elrohir in a much-emptied Imladris, bringing only a few of the Galadhrim back to their new home. Those who, like him, had accompanied those who sailed, to cling to all the time that remained.

The rooms he and Galadriel had shared were empty and strange, and he no longer desired to live in them. He found smaller quarters, and a balcony among green boughs where Haldir and the march wardens sat and worked in quiet hours. At night, the quiet voices through the leaves wove a strange detachment into his spirit. 

By day, he aided as he might, but the work held less satisfaction than it had in the past. The seasons changed, the leaves spun down and sprouted anew, and his spirit spun likewise aimless.

 

In the deep yellow sunset, Rumil came and sat beside him, seeking his council.

"Lord Celeborn? I am torn. There are mornings I love the dawn, and the leaves smell new and fresh, and the air is filled with so many scents that all the world seems free of shadow and filled with possibility. Yet sometimes I wake and cannot find my drinking cup, and remember it burned along with our flet. I look out upon Eryn Lasgalen, and find it lacking in silver mallorn, and I am disappointed when the forest floor is not the meadows of Caras Galadhon. I resent even the butterflies for being unfamiliar." Rumil hung his head, unbraided hair falling forward about his face. "Yet I know we could not stay, and even home is not home anymore."

"No. It is not." Celeborn let his hand rest on Rumil's shoulder, curled it warm about his neck, and let it remain. A long moment passed before some of the tension began to bleed from Rumil's frame. 

"You have done this before. This starting over."

"Even Doriath was made by elves who dwelt once in other homes." In all the ages of the sun, Celeborn had begun again many times. Doriath, Lindon, Harlindon, Eregion, Imladris. Lorien. Even the oceans, the rivers, the very mountains were changed. "The anger can linger, and poison the new place with the memory of the old, if it hangs always before your sight."

Rumil looked out into the leaves, speckled with dying sunlight. "I do not want that. I want to be happy here. My brothers and I, we chose to stay. This is where we belong. To have sailed—" He looked up, gaze full of apology for his words. "It would have felt like a retreat, my lord."

Celeborn squeezed gently in reassurance. "And so we remain, and those who felt it instead a blessing have departed."  
"It is hard to draw a line, to make a cut and say my feelings will go only so far and no further. Would it aid you to put it to song? Weave your memories into music, and let that hold Lothlorien close in thought."

Rumil folded his arms, hugging the thought close to himself. "I think I would like that. There are so many moments, even inconsequential, so many details I fear will be forgotten."

"Ask your brothers, and pass the word, and I will do likewise. We will make a song of little moments, to say farewell. And then we must go forward." To let the song end, and see the world without it. What little moments might he commit to song, to shared memory? Celebrian, dancing silver among the lembas corn, through fields that burned and would now lay forever fallow. Galadriel sweeping her weaving over his head, to see if the cloth held enough concealment. If the song let those moments sit a little distant, preserved outside his heart and no longer swirling at his core, perhaps then he would feel better able to breathe.

"My lord!" Celeborn found his face was wet, and Rumil held his hand, archery calluses rough and warm under his fingers. 

"I think, perhaps, that that is something I should no longer be."

 

He took his leave of the Galadhrim quietly, not without tears, and not without guilt – not least for the sense of excitement that stirred in his chest at the thought of answering only to and for himself again, as he had not since he was very young. 

He refused escort, and rode north alone, along the new trails that had followed the fires and the fighting. Hallrein's hooves were quiet, and he needed little correction to keep the path.

Celeborn avoided the woodmen's homes, passing without notice, save a solitary encounter with a girl-child who fed her flowers to his horse, and made him smile. He offered recompense for her lost bouquet in the form of a small clasp, shaped as niphredil, and held her happiness in his mind's eye as he rode on.

He did not see the sentries at the edge of Thranduil's lands, though he felt their gazes, and knew himself not alone. None descended to ask his business. Instead his cousin came himself, to meet him at the bridge before his gates, which lay wide, open to the forest. 

Elven eyes could pick out the flets hidden between the leaves, the movement between the branches. The elves of former Mirkwood were reclaiming their forest, now the darkness and the spiders were banished. 

Within the stronghold, there were echoes of voices, and laughter. Thranduil drew him in, and poured him wine, and let him speak. Celeborn found , over time, a confusion of things to say.

"You are good at this. Many of the Galadhrim adapt; East Lorien is good land, and the forest recovers even as it does here in the north. But many of them speak little or no Common Tongue, and many feel unsafe or untethered, without my lady's influence, and away from our city and familiar lands.

"I feel no pull West. I feel the earth, here. The green, the forest regrowing around me – yet as there were glass between myself and the world and I cannot touch it, and no more can it reach me. I see it. I miss it, that wildness. I want to feel new trees again, and immerse myself in the land. I miss her, and will miss her for all the time we are apart. But I do not want to follow her, not now, when the world is finally clean.

Conviction rose in his throat and spilled past his lips, heavy with truth. "I will go West by the swiftest road, or not at all."

Thranduil inclined his head with a look that held only understanding.

"That will be my road also."

Celeborn looked out in the direction of the great doors. "I will go to Imladris. Elladan and Elrohir are lords there. Though I do not know if I go to them for their comfort or only for my own."

"Need it be one or the other? If an outcome pleases all parties, it would be folly to dismiss it. Yet will you not rest?"

"Having begun this new folly, I will push on, I think, while my folly holds. Such is the nature of my wisdom."

Thranduil smiled, a quirked thing that made Celeborn remember him in his youth. "Go. See your grandsons. Your people may look to mine, in need or in friendship, you need not worry for them."

 

Thranduil's blessing followed him through the Greenwood like living thought. It was a welcome sensation. The great trees here were gnarled and strong, thick with leaves of a deep, living green, and there was a feeling, prickling at the edges of his perception, the sensation of a Silvan forest. Lorien had felt so, under Amdir's rule, but not so strongly. He found himself reluctant to leave the forest, though Hallrein welcomed the open grassland, and the wild outcroppings of pollen-heavy flowers.

He made the mountain-crossing in one long push. The pass was clear, and the weather good. He met no-one on the road, neither friend nor foe. He did not sleep until he had reached the midpoint of the descending slope; he would not rest among those stones that echoed back his daughter's suffering.

When finally he made to rest, he stared up into the night sky, and imagined Elvenhome as Galadriel had remembered it. He hoped the spirit of what she loved still remained there. He hoped Celebrian was healed, and had been there on the shore for her mother and her husband. 

He slept, and his eyes remained fixed on the stars.

 

The pull of safe-haven woven by Vilya was departed, but here Rivendell still lived, was still haven from the wild. 

Without the ring-song of protection, Celeborn was reminded of those first years he and Elrond had worked here, with Elrond's troops from Lindon and all those survivors Celeborn had managed to save from Eregion's fall. No great power had hidden the valley then, only the natural defenses of stone and land, and the hands and efforts of the people who sheltered within it.

Silvan sentries marked his passage over the valley's borders, and sang out soft greetings that he lifted his voice to return. The paths were not the same, having been trod, re-cut and worn away, and made new over the yeni. The waterfalls had likewise changed their courses, but their constant music sounded still sweet and familiar.

 

In the courtyard waited the remains of Elrond's house. The steward Erestor, robed in purple, and Lord Glorfindel stood at the fore. Elladan descended the central staircase as Celeborn dismounted, and an elf-maid with tea-brown hair stepped forward to take Hallrein under her command. Elrohir came from the lower gardens, but both twins stood together to welcome him.

The official words washed over him, and he responded by rote, poised outside himself. Then their arms were around him, and his own could not contain them both. The bright wash of their spirits, young and strong and fierce, surrounded him.

"Grandfather."

"We're glad you are come."

Over Elladan's shoulder, Glorfindel's smile was bright and his gaze shone brighter still. Over Elrohir's, Erestor's glance held no assessment, only welcome. Celeborn breathed in the scent of his daughter's children, and felt it steady him all the way to his core.

He had upheld his duty and promise to Amdir and to Amdir's son, and to their people, and seen them safe to a new home. The great battles of the world were done, the Enemy and his servant-Enemy both defeated and sent forth, and the lesser battles of the world remained. The battles of simply living.

Celeborn's roots were sunk deep into the living world, imperfect, changing, and forever east of the Sea. And his branches reached out, and were not alone.


End file.
